1965 Camouflaged Impala - Rear View

Heavy Metal Gets CamouflagedLongtime readers will recall Project Heavy Metal, a '65 Impala that became one of CC's most endearing project cars. It garnered quite a bit of notoriety not only for being one of the first big cars built in the early '90s long before they were cool, but also because the car was stolen and never recovered.

When Source Interlink decided to move our digs from Wilshire Boulevard to El Segundo, many long-forgotten treasures like this photo were unearthed in boxes of neglected files. The spray can artist is project manager Mike Johnson applying the first vestiges of a quickie camo paint job for a story then-staffer John Pearley Huffman penned in which Heavy Metal "foolishly challenges the M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank" ("Massive Firepower," Sept. '92 pg. 48).

While Heavy Metal was a bit outgunned in that adventure, it luckily escaped without any holes. But that didn't deter the Imp from running 11s in the quarter-mile. Ironically, both the car and Mike are lost to us now, but team originator Huffman, cobuilder Ed Taylor, and master fabricator Larry Ruth (who now has a shop in Spearfish, South Dakota) continue to fan the performance industry flames. The postscript you may not have heard is that several years ago, Huffman purely by chance discovered one of Heavy Metal's front fenders in the back of a Ford Country Squire station wagon near his home in Santa Barbara, California. The rest of the car has never been recovered.